"Creative strategists won't be replaced by AI. They'll be replaced by another creative strategist using AI better than them."
His single most-repeated position — the framing for why strategists should upskill now rather than fear AI.
"The majority of the research process is repetitive. And if it's repetitive, then that means it can be systemised. And if it can be systemised, then that means it can be done by AI."
His logical chain for why audience research will be AI-driven and strategists need to transition into prompt engineers.
"90% of your creative problems can be traced back to not doing a good enough research."
Internal Adcrate saying he repeats across talks — his case for why research, not execution, is the bottleneck.
"The only people that I've seen make good ads with AI are people who can make good ads without AI."
His fundamentals-over-tools stance — AI amplifies existing skill but doesn't substitute for it.
"If you cannot get great outputs from AI, then you just need to train the model better."
His counter to strategists complaining that AI outputs aren't good enough.
"I like to build things that I have to do once and then it pays me for a long time."
His operating principle behind prompt libraries, Custom GPTs, and reusable workflows over ad-hoc prompting.
"If you have run it standalone and it has worked, it has worked in spite of the creative, not because of."
His take on raw AI UGC ads — the tech isn't good enough to stand alone without being masked with real footage.
"More AI creative equals ads will get uglier."
His contrarian prediction that as AI floods the feed, users will gravitate toward signals of human authenticity.
"The goal of iterating is not to beat the original ad... The goal here is to extend the lifespan of this ad."
Reframing iteration away from 'beat the winner' toward squeezing more spend out of proven winners before saturation.
"85% of our winning ads in 2023 were mashups."
Internal Adcrate data point supporting his case that iterations and mashups — not net-new concepts — drive most wins.
"Let's stop glorifying hook rates and hold rates like they mean anything for performance. They are good diagnostics to see if we can improve an ad, but it does not mean anything about how the ad performed at the end of the day if you do not have relevant attention."
Direct attack on the industry obsession with top-of-funnel video metrics as performance indicators.
"Irrelevant attention means nothing."
His one-line distillation of why hook rate isn't a north-star metric.
"The brand that knows their audience the best wins."
The thesis underlying his entire research methodology and Audience OneSheet framework.
"Stop trying to put everyone on a free plan. There is so much more you can do on the pro plan."
Calling out agencies and brands being stingy with AI tool access — a primary blocker to team-wide AI adoption.
"I never promote tools that we don't actually use."
His signal of credibility when recommending tools — he's an operator first, not an affiliate.
